Category Archives: Death in Copper Town

About four years ago I decided to write a mystery series based on young rookie sheriff’s deputy who lived in the Verde Valley of Arizona.

The Verde is a unique place, an oasis in the middle of the Arizona desert, with one major river and five tributary creeks.

It is on the flight path between Mexico and points south, and the entire US and points north, which means seven kinds of hummingbirds, golden AND bald eagles, and 300 hundred + other birds to watch!

It has a huge cement plant, a salt mine, pecan orchards, wine vineyards, a thriving artists’ colony, and some of the most magnificent red rock scenery in the world.

PLUS, a real live ghost town.

In short, a milieu crying out for a mystery series to be created. I wrote five books in rough draft, and then circled back around to start rewriting and publishing. The first, DEATH in COPPER TOWN, begins the journey for my heroine, Pegasus Quincy, with her adjustment to life as a cop, in an environment very different from her native Tennessee.

As a Valentine’s gift to you this week, 2-12 through 2-16, please accept a free Kindle copy of this debut novel through Amazon using this link. Enjoy!

Usually I begin a new novel with setting. In the case of Death in Copper Town I was fascinated with the history of copper mining in Arizona. It started in the late 1800s, but continued until the 1950s, and even now companies are exploring ways to recover yet more minerals from the earth.

Next, I since I was writing a series, I needed to develop characters to people this setting. I wanted to write a police procedural, but one from a feminine viewpoint, and particularly that of a beginner. Enter Pegasus Quincy. I determined she needed to be a beginner, experiencing all that a cop learns for the first time, unjaded by patrol work in a grungy inner city setting. She had to have a sense of humor and a deep sense of caring for others in her world.

She wouldn’t know a lot about police procedure, since she was young and just out of the police academy; therefore she would view death like most of us do, something that happens out there, to somebody else.

Peg had recently moved from Tennessee to Arizona, trading lush green hills for the sometimes harsh high desert plateau. While she would know copperhead snakes, encountering timber rattlers would be unnerving. Javelinas would be a new experience for her as would dramatic summer monsoon thunderstorms in the southwest.

Oh, and since characters never operate in a vacuum, let’s give her a grandfather she can’t get along with, and a mother with early dementia, and a boss that rues the day he ever hired her.

Add bright red hair, a stubborn personality, and a six-foot height. Yes, that’ll get her started.

I’d love to hear from you. Use the box below to leave a comment, and, if you liked this post, please share to your friends using the little share buttons. To see Peg Quincy in action, purchase a copy of the book using the link on the book cover above. Thanks!

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Cozy Mystery Books A few of my author friends and I have put together this collection of cozy mystery books for your reading pleasure. Some are novels, some are collections, and some are a quick read, perfect for a warm afternoon by the fire. Murder and mayhem mostly in small towns. And I thought sm...

Even experienced wordsmiths struggle to portray deep emotion in their writing. It's as hard as mining copper from sulfur-laden rocks.

Writers may either tell about the emotion, for example, “He felt really, really angry.” Or, they may use the “dot-dot-dot” bypass popular when describing sex in 40s novels: “They entered the bedroom, the lights went out, and the next day…”

But effective writers know that emotion is a vital part of the human experience and pull it into their writing whenever possible.

Here are five way to deepen the emotional layering in your writing:

1. Accept the challenge that writing about emotion is hard. Good writers get immersed in their words, just as they hope their readers will. And writing about unpleasant emotions is difficult. Who wants to experience, even vicariously, the deep emotions of rage, grief, humiliation, sorrow, fear?

Delve into a time you, yourself had such a feeling. How did you feel experiencing it? What preceded the emotional outburst? How did you relive and rationalize your experience afterwards? Then write about the universal emotion that you felt, and that your character is also feeling.

2. Emotion is a daisy chain. Your character doesn’t immediately go on a rampage or experience an out-of-the-blue terror about high places. Something came before. Consider giving your characters a chance to delve into their back story internally. “This was just like the time when I was four, and the dog next door pushed through the fence and bit me.”

3. Emotion is physical. The old adage “show don’t tell” is critical here. An emotion courses through a person’s body, affecting their breathing, heart rate, skin temperature, stomach tension. Only then may it be reflected outward on the facial muscles: clenching the jaw, frowning, weeping. Finally it erupts into words: “You can’t mean that!” and actions: “He slammed the door so hard the glass cracked.”

Angela Ackerman’s book, EMOTIONAL THESAURUS is highly recommended to help you begin this journey of writing about the inward and outward signs of physical emotions.

4. Emotion is slower than rational thought. Think of seven objects: an orange, the London Bridge, a deck of cards, a big tree, a mailbox, a white horse, a can of Pepsi.

Can you feel your mind stopping to ponder each experience before moving on?

Give your readers a chance to do the same thing. Don’t rush over emotion, but rather create a scene that can fully explore what’s happening. And then go back and lengthen it by twice.

5. There is an arc to emotion. In other words, the emotion will typically build in intensity.

For example, the character punches the alarm and sleeps too late. In her rush to get ready for work, the glass of orange juice spills to the floor, she trips on the rug on her way out the door, the car battery is dead…by the time she gets to the office, she explodes at her assistant over one small typo in a memo...

And a bonus concept to build your emotional writing skills:

6. Emotions are not rational. Your character in the middle of intense emotion is not going to stop and think, “Oh, I am afraid.”

But afterwards, there can be a place for a rational assessment of what happened: “I was stupid for going into that dark alley alone.” “I really did a good job at that presentation, even though I was nervous.”

Or they may decide to do differently next time. “I’ve got to watch myself and not make such a fuss. It wasn’t my assistant’s fault I was late.”

Donald Maas, in his wonderful book: THE EMOTIONAL CRAFT OF FICTION, explains that the purpose of fiction is to get the reader to feel their own emotions, triggered by the words on the page.

Think about it. What authors do is time-travel. They are able to connect with anonymous readers somewhere in the far distant future.

Including deep emotions in your writing can layer, deepen, and enrich your work. This skill makes your reader eager to return a second, and a third time, demanding more. Exactly what you as a writer want! ...

As a Valentine’s gift to you this week, 2-12 through 2-16, please accept a free Kindle copy of the debut novel of the Pegasus Quincy mystery series through Amazon using this link: www.amazon.com/dp/B073DMDZFF

About four years ago I decided to write a mystery series based on young rookie sheriff’s deputy who lived in the Verde Valley of Arizona.

The Verde is a unique place, an oasis in the middle of the Arizona desert, with one major river and five tributary creeks.

It is on the flight path between Mexico and points south, and the entire US and points north, which means seven kinds of hummingbirds, golden AND bald eagles, and 300 hundred + other birds to watch!

It has a huge cement plant, a salt mine, pecan orchards, wine vineyards, a thriving artists’ colony, and some of the most magnificent red rock scenery in the world.

PLUS, a real live ghost town.

In short, a milieu crying out for a mystery series to be created. I wrote five books in rough draft, and then circled back around to start rewriting and publishing. The first, DEATH in COPPER TOWN, begins the journey for my heroine, Pegasus Quincy, with her adjustment to life as a cop, in an environment very different from her native Tennessee.

How deep into the Earth can we go and still find life? Marine microbiologist Karen Lloyd introduces us to deep-subsurface microbes: tiny organisms that live buried meters deep in ocean mud and have been on Earth since way before animals. Learn more about these mysterious microbes, which refuse to gr...